Pat Killingsworth, a former social studies teacher and real estate agent from Wisconsin, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma three years ago. “You try to find meaning when you’re 51 years old and somebody says you have cancer and are going to die in three to four years,” said Killingsworth.

“What are you going to do with three to four years? I decided I wanted to write two or three books to help cancer patients. I wanted to help them speed up that learning curve so they could make better treatment…

Phil Brabbs, a software product manager and former kicker for the University of Michigan football team, was diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma the day after his 28th birthday. “At 28, looking at my son who was two, you think, ‘Will this kid ever remember me?’ It was really frightening,” he said.

“To get a cancer diagnosis when it seems like you’re doing everything right – you don’t smoke, you drink modestly, you exercise – it was quite shocking. But I don’t think it took more than a week or two…

“For as long as I can remember, I have been a builder, a fixer, an explorer,” said myeloma patient Scott Woodward in a speech at an event benefitting Gilda’s Club, a cancer support group. “You’d want me along if you ever got shipwrecked.”

After a boyhood fixing motorcycles and rider lawnmowers, Woodward is now a New York-based mechanical engineer who researches the fluid dynamics of blood. He has lived with multiple myeloma since his diagnosis just after Christmas in 2005.

Woodward told the Myeloma Beacon that at the time…

“They put me on some routine blood tests and it showed up in there,” said Karen Crowley, a proud mother and writer of the blog “The Adventures of Cancer Girl.” “I didn’t even feel sick, and all of a sudden, I had cancer.”

Crowley was diagnosed in November 2005 with smoldering myeloma – a type of myeloma that advances slowly and exhibits no symptoms. As a relatively healthy 34-year-old woman, Crowley had never heard the term “multiple myeloma” until she received her unexpected diagnosis.

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